Into Thin Air (36 page)

The whole drive home Karen clamored for Lee. “It's too late, we're going home,” Roy said. Karen kicked at the seat. “It isn't,” she said.

“Don't kick the seat,” Roy said.

“The way you've behaved, you'll be lucky if you see her by next month, Lady Jane,” Valerie said. “I'm sick of this, I really am, I do everything and this is the thanks I get.”

Karen's mouth snapped shut. She edged toward the window, squeezing her eyes shut so the colors blurred the world into another place. When the car passed Lee's block, she stiffened. She tried to catch Roy's eyes in the rearview mirror, but he was looking straight ahead. He swerved into the turn toward home. She didn't move until Roy had parked the car back in front of the house.

“Into the house until supper,” Valerie said. She was going to make something easy, something adult. Pasta and clam sauce, Karen, she thought meanly, could just eat the pasta plain or with butter. Or she could stay in her room and sulk until she was hungry enough for a peanut-butter sandwich. She strode into the kitchen and surveyed the open cupboard of food. Cilantro, she thought, and reached for the oblong green can.

Roy, face set, grabbed the paper from the porch and headed for the bedroom. He sprawled on the bed, his shoes hanging over the clean spread, and flipped through the entertainment section. He felt like seeing a movie, but not with Karen or with Valerie.

Neither one of them saw Karen getting her jacket, stepping lightly onto the front porch, and walking purposefully down the street. It wasn't until nearly ten minutes later, when Valerie began making a tomato sauce out of guilt, that she thought to call Karen, and by that time Karen was nearly halfway to Lee's.

She knew the way. She had walked it with Lee in nights so black she had to count her steps just to know where a curb was. Lee had told her it was Indian walking, that they were scouts staking out their territory. “Sight isn't the only way you know something,” Lee told her. She had shown her how to know which direction a car was coming from just by the sound. She had taught her to find the gas station just by the smell of the gas. “You use all your senses, even the invisible ones,” Lee said. “Like sometimes you just
feel
someone's behind you.” Karen started. She thought Lee meant the ghost or the way she sometimes smelled her mother's perfume or heard her boots, She thought maybe Lee could tell her how to turn around so quickly her mother might still be there.

She hadn't liked the aquarium. She hadn't wanted to tell Valerie or Roy, but she had been afraid of the fish. Their mouths suctioning up against the glass, their white eyes staring at her, were like nightmares. “Look at this,” Valerie kept saying, edging Karen closer to the tank with the weight of her body. Roy pretended he didn't care when she wouldn't go up close to the baby shark tank, but she felt him watching her. Valerie kissed too hard, the way her mother's friends had when her mother had asked them to. Her touch was angry. She jerked on Karen's jersey; she smoothed Karen's hair right down to the bone of scalp. Valerie and Roy punished her all the time. She waited for them to get tired of it, to send her home, to stop insisting they were her parents. They wouldn't let her hang up the pictures she had drawn of her mother. They wouldn't let her talk about her. Behave, they said. Behave. She banged her feet across the wood floor; she threw a spoon so hard that her mother could hear and trail it clear across the country.

Karen recognized the street by the sound of the cars. There up ahead was the stop sign. Lee had made her practice stopping in front of the sign. Look all ways, she had said. Cars don't have eyes. You do. Karen widened her eyes. Two cars passed, whizzing so fast she heard a smear of music, and then she saw Lee, standing at the far end of the road, resting on a rake, talking to Andy.

She looked in back of her to check traffic. Two cars were coming, and she stopped, patient, the way Lee had told her to. She was rocking on the heels of her red sneakers when she saw a third car coming toward her, a flash of red skidding to a stop so sudden, she bounced from the curb.

She could see Valerie's head poking out of the front window, and Valerie suddenly jerked open the front door, hinging out her legs. “Karen!” Valerie shouted. The sound made Lee start. She set down the rake and was suddenly striding toward Karen, trying to cross the busy street. Lee waved her arms at Karen.

Panicked, Karen looked back at Lee, and then she began running into the street. In front of her Lee was zigzagging through traffic toward her. In back of her she saw Valerie, her face as pale and white as a slice of moon, and for a moment it seemed as if Valerie were running toward Lee and not toward her at all.

She didn't see the car. Her blood was coursing through her like electric current. A car horn sang in her ear. Valerie made a sudden lunge, and Karen bolted back, turning toward Lee, slamming into the sudden path of a blue sedan that arced her up into the air, and the whole time she could hear her own breath, like the heady rush of wind from the back of a motorcycle.

Valerie had refused to leave the hospital. She kept asking every nurse who walked by if there had been some mistake about her daughter. She kept trying to go into the room where they had brought Karen, even after the nurse told her that Karen's body had already been removed.

Valerie nudged Roy's hands from her, circling the waiting room, sitting down on one of the turquoise plastic chairs and then rising up again every time a doctor approached. “Come on, baby,” Roy said. “Come on, Please.” She looked at him blankly and then sat down on one of the chairs again.

She couldn't quite remember. Details kept shifting, jumbling in sequence. She remembered the car, how it had fishtailed to a stop with a scream of tires. She remembered the driver, a weeping middle-aged woman in a bow-blouse suit, who braced her body against the hood of her car as if she were an ornament. She remembered being frozen, too, encased in a kind of force field. She kept thinking. If I don't move, nothing more will happen. She remembered Karen hitting the pavement in a spasm of blood, and then she remembered Karen limp in Lee's arms, a bright spreading star of crimson on Lee's white shirt. When the ambulance came, the driver had put a hand on Lee's shoulder, crouching down, whispering, as intimate and shocking as a slap. Valerie moved through the force field. She grabbed on to the sleeve of the attendant. His limp black hair skidded into his face when he looked up at her. “My little girl,” Valerie said, the only words she knew, and the attendant stood up, pivoting from Lee, fading her into the background, and this time the arms he touched were Valerie's.

She remembered Roy. His shirt had been pasted to his back, His hair and face had been so damp with sweat that he looked as though he had stepped from a shower, and when she had touched him, he had shaken beneath her fingers. Andy had been crying. His face was puffy with tears she hadn't seen since he had been kicked off Little League when he was twelve. She hadn't wanted them to touch Karen. She kept telling them that everyone knew you weren't supposed to move people after an accident. “That rule's for everyone but us,” one of the attendants told Valerie, crouching over her daughter like a shroud. They wouldn't let her ride in the ambulance until she threatened to sue them, and the whole ride there she kept one hand on Karen, in a way Karen never would have permitted if she had been aware. “I'm here,” Valerie said.

She didn't remember the others arriving, only that they had somehow always been here, always been crying, too, it seemed. Lee slumped against Andy. Valerie looked at him, and he carefully extricated himself from Lee and went to his sister, crouching before her. “Hey,” he said.

“I can't leave,” she said.

“Sure you can. You can leave with me,”

“No, I can't,” she said, but then he was lifting her up, her weight braced against his arm. She wasn't aware of moving, but the hospital was trailing past her, one room seeming to blend right into the next until they were at the back emergency doors, and for a moment Valerie was pinned in place. “It's all right,” Andy said, and pushed at the door, leading her into the cold night. “There's a million stars out,” Valerie said in amazement. “Oh, God, it's a clear night.” She twisted in Andy's grip, turning around a little, stumbling against Roy and Lee, and as soon as she saw the starry stain of blood, rusted on Lee's white blouse, she remembered everything all over again.

“Get her away,” Valerie said, her voice hard and shiny.

“Valerie,” said Lee.

“Get her away from me,” Valerie said. She began shaking, trying to wrench from Andy's grip.

“It's all right,” Andy said. He soothed Valerie back around so she was facing the night. “Let's just get you home first,” said Andy. He let her walk on ahead by herself, and then he turned to Lee, who had her arms bundled about her as if she were freezing.

Awkwardly he rubbed her forearms. “Here. Take the keys. Get a cab and go to my place. I'll be there as soon as I can.” Baffled, she stepped back from him. “I'm supposed to go?” she said.

“No, just for a minute,” he said. “Just a minute. Just so I can tend to my sister and Roy. She's in a state. And I have to make sure they aren't alone in the house. I have to make calls.”

“I can't be there?”

“Lee—she's in shock. Every time she looks at you, it upsets her.” He smoothed back her hair. “Give it time.”

Lee started to cry. She turned to look back at Valerie, who deliberately shut her eyes. Lee abruptly took the keys from Andy, but when he bent toward her she moved from him so that all he was touching was air.

He worried about her the whole drive home. Flushed with guilt and grief, he made the turns toward Valerie's home. He knew how much she had loved Karen, but Valerie was his sister, Valerie was the mother. And he had told her to go to his place. He knew if she went home, she'd be surrounded by Karen's pictures on her refrigerator, by the toys she kept for her. His place, at least, would be full of him. He looked at his watch. The first call he'd make would be to her.

He drove Valerie and Roy home in silence. He saw Valerie flinch when the car pulled into the driveway. There was a tricycle in the front yard, a muddied blue ball by the side. The dining room table was set for three. He made them come into the kitchen and sit around Valerie's huge oak table while he made the calls. He called Lee first, feeling a flicker of fear when she didn't pick up. Then he called everyone he knew. He told them the same thing, but every time he said it, it didn't feel any truer. He called Roy's parents, he called his own, and when his mother answered he burst into tears.

Roy stood up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and walked out of the room.

When the first knock came, the first people, for a moment Andy kept thinking it might be Lee. He waited until there were at least a dozen people in the house. Waitresses, cooks, friends, all of them orbiting edgily around the kitchen. Someone had brought a platter of fruit, still encased in crinkled paper. Someone else had brought a bag of groceries and was chopping in the corner. He walked over to Valerie, who was sitting perfectly still, her hands folded schoolgirl style in her lap.

“I'm going now,” he told Valerie, bending to kiss her hair.

“I know,” she said.

“You let me take care of the details, all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You call any time of night,” he said. “I'll be here first thing in the morning.” He looked at her. “You want me to stay?”

“No, You go.” She frowned. “Roy hasn't come out of the bedroom all evening.”

“You want me to go get him?”

“No. Let him be alone.”

He nodded and then Marielle, one of the cooks at the restaurant, came over and promptly burst into tears. “Oh, honey,” she wept, and rocked Valerie into an embrace.

He drove past Lee's apartment on the way to his, peering up at her dark windows. When he got to his house he rang the bell, half hoping Lee might answer the door. Instead, though, he jiggled the key into the lock himself. He entered an apartment so dark, it made him feel helpless. He didn't realize Lee was there until he started to walk toward the phone, and then he heard her, crying in the bathroom. “Lee?” he said.

She was in the bathtub, her arms about her knees, her face so swollen it seemed as if flesh had been puttied on. As soon as he saw her, he felt wounded. “Come on,” he said. He bent and lifted her up into the one clean towel he had, and then he led her, as if she were blind, to the bedroom, her wet feet making prints on the dark wood floor. “Okay now,” he said, and lowered her to his bed and stretched out beside her, stroking her hair, her face, the hollows just under her chin. “Talk to me,” he said, but she kept choking. The shoulders of his shirt were wet with her tears. “Just get it out,” he said, but no matter how much he coaxed, she couldn't seem to tell him anything at all.

He felt like a voyager between two planets. The first thing he did when he got up was go see his sister. There were always people in the house. Valerie cried nonstop, talking incoherently about Karen, blaming Karen's wild mother, blaming the adoption agency and herself, and almost always blaming Lee. “She lured her,” Valerie said. She looked up at Andy.

“She didn't lure her,” he said, “We were talking, planning a vacation.”

“Hah,” said Valerie. “Lee go on a vacation with you.”

“Val,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Don't tell me. You're blind.”

“Come on. Let's go sit on the porch. It's cooler.”

“Karen was running to
me
, Andy.”

“I know,” he said. “I know she was.”

He was exhausted most of the time and constantly worried. He didn't like the way Lee was grieving, as terribly and as hard as his sister. He'd get to Lee's house and she'd be wobbling on her feet. “I can't sleep when you aren't here,” she whispered. She listed toward him, and as soon as her head rested against his shoulder, she seemed already to be dreaming. He put her to bed, and as long as he was aside her she slept, but all he had to do was get up to get water and she would bolt upright, alarmed.